


Do Unto Others

by Rhaized



Series: Adventures of Mary and Marisa [15]
Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coming Out, Even though she fails to be there for Mary as Mary is for her, F/F, Kinda real, Kinda tense, Marisa does too, Mary opens herself, Self-Discovery, Tension, kinda angsty, kinda sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29589024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhaized/pseuds/Rhaized
Summary: After Marisa starts working with Mary in the Dark Matter Research Lab, Mary decides to tell her something very important about herself. The exchange, while not bad, does not go entirely as Mary expects, as Marisa shares something, too.
Relationships: Marisa Coulter/Mary Malone
Series: Adventures of Mary and Marisa [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2073954
Comments: 5
Kudos: 35





	Do Unto Others

It was during a Tuesday morning coffee meeting at one of the local cafés in Oxford that Mary suddenly decided to reveal something very important about herself to Marisa. 

"I'm gay," she blurted out there at their little booth, right after Marisa had taken a sip of her mocha cappuccino. 

They were reviewing student papers in the back of Mary's favorite coffee place just off campus. The lab was a bit crowded today as the larger group was finishing up a set of experiments, so Mary and Marisa decided to flee to the solitude of a lowkey coffee shop to desperately finish grading papers before their students started hounding them about it. They'd been talking casually about movies and food and, eventually, matters of love and companionship, which is what spurred Mary to just come out and  _ say  _ it. 

Marisa lowered her cup and looked over at Mary, face perfectly calm and poised with one eyebrow raised. "Pardon me?" 

Oh, this was just  _ brilliant.  _ Mary felt her face flush and redden as she reached down for her cup of coffee and shoved it to her lips, hoping to catch some sort of reprieve to gather her thoughts. This was  _ not  _ how this was supposed to go. Mary wasn't a closeted lesbian by any means, but her sexuality just wasn't something she talked about like this. She wasn’t the “shout it from the rooftops” kind of girl, probably due to her almost four decades of patriarchal oppression. Everyone in the lab knew, of course, and they were so wonderful about it, but it wasn’t exactly a dedicated talking point or anything. It was something that had come up naturally and over time, not blurted out like  _ this  _ for seemingly no reason at  _ all. _

She didn't know  _ why  _ it was so important for her to tell Marisa about it. Mary didn't go up to every faculty member on campus dramatically declaring it, after all! It was probably because she and Marisa were working more closely together now. They spent a lot of time working on their experiments and teaching their courses and reviewing articles. It was just a thing Mary wanted to share with a colleague, as a...friend, as someone she regularly interacted with and was getting to know better.

At least, that's what Mary  _ said  _ to herself, now and ever since Marisa crashed into her life all those months ago.

Neither of them said anything for a few moments. Mary continued drinking her coffee even though she'd been sipping it for far too long and Marisa kept staring at her, eyes still expressionless yet glimmering in the faint lighting of the shop. 

"I'm gay," Mary repeated as the silence droned on, a little louder and more confidently this time. She felt better now, after having said it twice. There was no going back; she’d done it. It happened. It was all out there on the table. And she felt  _ better,  _ even as she still felt incredibly unsure of  _ what  _ she was even doing.

As she said it again, however, Marisa did an unexpected thing. 

“Shh,” Marisa let out quickly, her voice fading into the last of the shush. She looked around them with narrowed eyes, tensing up immediately. “Don’t let anyone hear you.”

“Huh?” Mary asked. She felt an odd and crushing sort of chill spread through her then. She didn't often experience people acting  _ weird  _ about such matters. It was 2021, after all, where society (well, at least the academics in Mary's circles) were more accepting of different sexualities. Why should she worry about someone  _ hearing  _ them? Mary couldn’t help but feel both surprised and increasingly hurt at the way Marisa was reacting to this, and at the thick tension that swirled between them now. Mary hadn't taken Marisa as a religious zealot (despite the previous life she led), but was she, in fact, one of  _ those  _ people? Had Mary drastically misread her personality and her worldviews? 

“You—isn’t this sort of thing supposed to be kept  _ secret?”  _ Marisa returned, eyes still narrowed as she scanned all around them.

“No?” Mary said slowly, and then Marisa stopped, turning to gaze at Mary with wide eyes. 

“It’s not?” she breathed. The air cleared between them instantly as Marisa more fully relaxed, her shoulders slouching as she leaned her arms on the table and continued to stare at Mary as if she were seeing her for the first time.

“Is it in your world?” Mary asked back, and it was at the quick flash of fear from Marisa that Mary more fully understood.

Marisa’s world was different. That Mary understood right away from when they’d first gotten to know each other. A patriarchal society in which women, even those as brilliant as Marisa, were not allowed to earn doctorates, not allowed to hold certain positions, and not allowed to do many other things. The matter of one’s sexuality, then, was not something with much freedom either, Mary could only assume. That was an obsession with these religious purists, the  _ sanctioned  _ love between a man and a woman with any deviance from that a grave sin. Marisa had never talked about it (Mary supposed they’d never had a reason to), but Mary could tell by her reaction here that it was the tradition she had been held to.

Marisa took a deep breath as she raised her cappucino to her lips, her eyes surveying Mary as she took a deep sip. “It’s frowned upon in my world, yes.”

“So people hide it?” Mary asked. Their tone and exchange was relatively calm, despite the charged feeling that coursed through Mary’s system. Marisa hadn’t actually  _ said  _ anything in response to Mary’s admission. She hadn’t said, “oh, good for you,” or “hey, I support you,” or even “oh, get away from me.” Mary was waiting for  _ something, anything  _ from her. It was odd, to get nothing at all from her. Mary just didn't understand what was happening. 

“Typically, yes,” Marisa mused, “although it’s not... _ unknown,  _ to some circles.”

She was being cryptic, which was weird, but Mary sensed something  _ else  _ stir between them. It was then that Mary noticed Marisa’s subtle discomfort. She was playing with her watch, her right arm moving to twist the watch sideways. Her jaw was also tense, which wasn’t exactly unusual for her (Marisa  _ was  _ a little uptight) but that felt especially  _ reactive  _ in a way Mary couldn’t describe but definitely could intuit.

“Oh?” Mary pressed, equally as neutral and not offering much. This was still, as she kept thinking, not entirely fair to her. Marisa didn’t say anything. She didn’t offer any sort of emotional response to something that was very sensitive and important to Mary. She was now sitting here  _ theorizing  _ sexuality and the ways its acceptance differs between their worlds like they were talking about any old concept and not a part of who Mary  _ was. _

Perhaps she knew this, though. Again something about Marisa struck Mary as off. She stopped playing with her watch but then moved both her hands to her cappuccino, where she tapped it lightly. Marisa wasn’t one to nervously tap. She was cool, calm, collected, and in control of herself. This Mary understood well about her. So why was she behaving like this? Did she have something to say that she didn’t want to? Did she not  _ accept  _ this about Mary?

“I...” Marisa began, but then she stopped, moving to bite her lip.

It was here that Mary wished the golden monkey was with her and not locked away in the lab somewhere. He was, as Mary had come to know him, the more vulnerable side of Marisa. He betrayed her deepest thoughts and feelings even as she locked them all away. He was the crack and tear in her facade, always revealing nothing much yet just enough. Now, though, Mary couldn’t tell what was happening. She didn’t know what to expect, which troubled her more than she’d like to actually admit.

“Look,” said Mary after a few more long, painful moments of silence dragged on, “just forget I said anything, okay? We need to grade these papers.”

Take the high road, they’d taught Mary in the Catholic faith. Be the better person. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do not as you necessarily want but as you  _ ought to. _ It was weird and Mary was hurt, but this wasn’t the time or place to get into it. She was acting impulsively and emotionally in a way that Marisa didn’t particularly respond well to. Mary knew this about her, and she almost felt like hitting her head to the table for being so  _ stupid  _ and so  _ careless  _ as to throw this on her like that.

“I’m having a hard time responding to you because the matter of my own sexuality is something I’ve long struggled with but wasn’t able to properly consider or explore.”

Again, Marisa surprised her. This woman never ceased to surprise her. Mary looked up from a student’s paper to simply stare at her. Marisa’s blue eyes met Mary’s, fierce yet soft as she let out a very small and rare moment of vulnerability.

“Oh,” Mary replied, finding her tone softer now, kinder. This wasn’t what she had been expecting or was prepared for. She had to regroup and gather her thoughts. She felt a little dazed, but things started to make better sense now. “Gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”

“Because I was married to a man, had an affair with another, and had a child out of wedlock?” Marisa demanded, her own tone so  _ biting  _ that Mary almost wanted to wince away from her.

“Because you’ve literally said nothing about it,” Mary answered quickly,  _ trying  _ not to feel defensive but wanting to at least clarify herself. 

She could understand how hard this must be hard for Marisa. Sexuality was a tricky thing in general, regardless of the culture. It seemed _especially_ difficult in patriarchal societies such as Marisa's, though, where men and women each had so clearly defined roles and customs. Mary could see how impossible it could feel to explore anything that strayed outside or between those lines. Mary thought back to her own youth, where she was constantly getting crushes on female classmates and female celebrities and could tell no one except two trusted friends who didn’t dare judge or abandon her. 

Who would Marisa have had? Who would have been there for her?

After more icy silence, during which Marisa stared coolly at a point just above Mary’s head, Mary cleared her throat. “Do you, uh, would you like to talk more about it?”

“Not particularly,” Marisa exhaled, a sense of such profound sadness puffing out that Mary knew not to press her further.

They returned to their students’ papers, drifting into a still-tense but tolerable enough silence as they read, pens gliding onto the page every few minutes as pages turned over. The chatter of the café buzzed around them, too, preventing them from entirely getting lost in the tension but, at the same time, not being strong enough to distract them from it.

“Her name was Diane,” Marisa said after about fifteen minutes or so. She didn’t look up as she spoke. Her red pen was still in her right hand as her left was thumbing over her the pages of an essay, the pinnacle of concentration. “She was another researcher when I traveled to Africa. From a university in America.”

For a reason she couldn’t quite explain, Mary understood that her role here was to listen, not to interject or ask questions or comment or judge. She just had to listen.

“It's different out there, in our America," Marisa continued after pausing to scribble something down and then take another sip of her drink. "The Magisterium doesn't have as much…  _ Influence.  _ They call the Americans improper and unsanctioned for some of the ways they operate, but I see them and I think they are...free. Or, at least, freer than I ever could be in Brytain or Geneva.”

Mary continued to listen, setting her pen down and folding her hands in front of her on the wooden table. 

"Diane was very animated in a way I'd never seen before. She wasn't prim and proper like myself and so many other women I knew but spicy and extravagant. She was appealing, in that way, I suppose. She had a way of inviting you in and keeping you close. And it was just us for most of the trip down through the jungle, as we'd gotten separated from the rest of the group after an unexpected tension with a herd of animals. She saved me from getting hurt, actually. And we fled together on foot in our pursuit of finding the…a group of people for our research."

She wasn't telling the entire truth, Mary knew. She wouldn't expect her to. It was in Marisa's nature to hold back and keep the full story to herself, for her own purposes and for fear of what others would do, perhaps. But her feelings were genuine, and Mary sensed such  _ emotion  _ wrapped around what Marisa was saying (and what she  _ wasn’t _ saying). Mary recognized the justification behind Marisa’s words, too, the explanations she was trying to give for what it was she had been doing and feeling and experiencing.

Mary could relate. Gosh, she could relate! But still, she knew that she couldn't yet speak.

“She was...Different,” Marisa went on. She was still looking down at the papers in front of her, but her pen was loose in her hand and she was no longer actively trying to work. She was just staring in front of her. “I’d never met anyone like her, man or woman or anyone else.”

Again, Mary could relate. Feeling her throat start to tighten a little bit, she kept gazing at Marisa, taking in her slim-fitting sweater, slicked-back hair, perfectly-polished nails, and the restricted sense of openness seeping out of her now.  _ Oh,  _ could Mary relate, as Marisa was unlike anyone Mary had ever met in her entire life.

“She took care of me, out there in the wilderness. And I took care of her. We took care of each other, and when we reached our destination and eventually regrouped with the team, I felt...Close to her. In a way I’d never felt with Edward and had only ever felt with Asriel.”

This was where Mary could only listen and try to understand. From her earliest days she’d never once been attracted to men. She thought she was  _ supposed  _ to be and worried quite a bit about why those “butterflies” never happened for her like they did for the other girls when a cute boy talked to them or even when they watched actors on TV. Mary had wondered if she just would never feel like that for anybody at all, but then experienced it with women, and grew up struggling to learn how to properly express herself and what it is she wanted.

“I loved Asriel,” Marisa said quietly then, catching Mary’s attention. She looked back over at her to see she was no longer looking down but up, her blue eyes filled with such a striking sort of emotion. Mary didn’t even know  _ what  _ it was, but just that it was there, cascading out of Marisa endlessly. “I really did. For a moment I wanted to run away with him, wanted to keep Lyra and be damned with all of them. But I...felt something about this woman, too, after I’d met him and we’d parted ways. And I don’t know exactly what it means, and never bothered to pursue it because....Well, I never could, so why bother?”

She was done now. Mary still had so many questions for her—what, exactly, had happened? How long were they in Africa? What did Diane think and feel? Did they say anything to each other? Did she think about her often? But Mary wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t press. She didn’t know  _ what  _ she was supposed to do, exactly, especially since this was supposed to be  _ Mary’s  _ moment, which still bothered her. She recognized the shift, though, and wanted to be there for Marisa perhaps in the way she wished Marisa could be there for her.

“Your feelings are so incredibly valid, Marisa,” Mary finally said, voice soft again. “All of them: at once or separate, past or present.”

Surprise flickered across Marisa’s face at that. It was light, like a small draft of air, but it was still there, nestled across her eyes and her cheeks and her forehead. “I—Thank you.”

“We don’t judge that kind of thing here,” Mary said. “Well,  _ I  _ don’t, and our colleagues and most educated people in academia don’t. Some others do because they’re awful. But the people who count and who matter? They don’t care. They accept it, even if you don’t quite know what ‘it’ is.”

For the third time that morning Marisa was quiet, her gaze pensive as she looked from Mary to her coffee to the stack of papers and then back again. “I have never heard anyone ever say such a thing.”

“Good God,” Mary let out, and she smiled, even as it felt a bit inappropriate for the occasion. “What an ivory tower they locked you in, huh?”

Marisa smiled back, her posture slackening again. “I suppose so, yes. I learn more every day exactly how much so.”

“Well, you’re free here,” Mary offered. Something changed in Marisa’s expression then. It almost looked like some kind of light went on, like it brightened the woman in the smallest yet most distinct way. “You’ll never have to shy away from who you are. And thank you for sharing that with me. I know it must not be easy for you to share, especially if you're not used to talking about these things.”

_ This  _ was where Mary expected it to come: Marisa’s acknowledgement of Mary's own admission. She wanted to hear, after setting her own example of it, “and thank  _ you  _ for sharing, Mary. You are wonderful as you are no matter who you love.” But of course it didn’t come. Marisa nodded at that, turning her focus back to her papers. They’d been at the shop for almost an hour now and unfortunately had barely gotten anything done, thanks to Mary and her word vomit and then the entire backstory of Marisa and her “encounter,” as she’d called it at one point. Mary was annoyed, in general and also at how she’d have to grade these papers at home tonight if she wanted to give them back in a reasonable amount of time.

“I’ve got a meeting coming up so I better get going,” Mary sighed a bit later, looking over at Marisa. The woman nodded, still not looking up, and Mary again felt sad. She usually had a pretty good read of people. She knew who she liked and who she didn’t, who was more reserved and who was more open. She’d pegged Marisa correctly on most of these, but the one that she seemed to have mistaken was the extent to which Marisa  _ cared.  _ Mary knew it was hard and difficult for her, but she still thought that Marisa was someone who would care, given the relationship they’d already established. But perhaps she was wrong, and perhaps all the others were right. 

As Mary gathered up her papers and dumped them in her bag and grabbed her now-cold coffee, however, Marisa cleared her throat to speak: “I’m...happy for you, you know. And I’m glad you told me, and that we had this conversation.”

Mary stared at her. Marisa still wasn’t looking at her. She barely moved, even, and went right back into grading her papers. 

It was a start, Mary figured, feeling herself sigh as she slung her bag over her shoulder and headed toward the door, dropping her cup into the bin as she passed it. Marisa was more delicate about it than Mary had imagined, which was disappointing, perhaps, or at the very least not what Mary had been expecting. But it was a start, what happened today. And it was in Mary’s nature and her character to be understanding, to be kind, and to be patient. Even when others couldn't exactly do the same for her. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'd been kicking around the idea of a coming out story for a while, particularly with the understanding that Marisa's world is indeed very different than ours in terms of its religious powers and (I can only assume) tolerance of things like sexuality. In some of my other fics I'd addressed the matter more lightly, with Mary (always Mary, lol) confessing to Marisa that she likes her and things going from there.
> 
> But, I think that there is definitely a tension here that might exist. And, of course, I kind of headcanon Marisa as being maybe bisexual or pansexual, maybe not entirely sure WHAT she is but never having been able to figure it out before. So I thought I'd explore that here in a way I haven't before.
> 
> So, kinda heavy!! But something I just had been thinking about. ♥︎


End file.
